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We know a lot about the broad impact the First World War had on Australia.  From a population of less than five million, more than 400,000 men enlisted, over 60,000 didn’t make it home, and tens of thousands more were wounded, gassed or taken prisoner.  We’ve also heard individual accounts, whether they be about well-known national heroes like Jack Simpson, or family heroes whose stories are passed down through generations.

However, despite almost a century of scholarship, we know far less about World War One’s (WWI) effect on the home front in Western Australia, where more than 32,000 men enlisted. What was the true impact of the conflict in the suburbs and streets and how was the average household affected?

The Landscape of Loss project seeks to answer these questions and is UWA PhD student Claire Greer’s thesis.

“Australians have such a high level of attachment to WWI and ANZAC Day in particular. Over one hundred years later the day still holds a lot of emotion and I’ve always been interested to know what underpins this,” she says.

“I’d been researching Western Australia's individual WWI soldiers for many years, but in 2013 I decided to take a different approach. The stories I was finding from around the state were fascinating, but the lives of the men were so different, and their contexts so far apart, that I wasn't gaining much new insight into the bigger picture.”

Claire’s new approach was to map the impact of WWI on one single, defined area.

“I chose Subiaco and have been mapping the impact from household to household across the entire suburb. Who went to war, who didn’t, who died, who was injured. I started with a pilot project on Olive Street and it produced such interesting detail that I knew a wider project would uncover even more,” Claire says.

“As a nation we suffered so many losses and mapping it against a whole neighbourhood context shows the true extent like never before. It’s almost a network of loss. In Subiaco in the early 1900s we see a lot of family members, colleagues, school friends, best mates, all living in the same area. So when someone lost their son at war, it was terrible for the family, but the impact also reverberated though many other households in the same suburb. When you multiply that across hundreds of local losses, it’s easy to see how these events multiplied to shake the nation to its core.”

A UWA Archaeology graduate, Claire sees a lot of methodology cross-overs between this discipline and the landscape approach in her history PhD thesis.

“I graduated in 2002 and have been working in the Aboriginal heritage sector ever since. In my spare time I also write fiction which is set during WWI so in some respects Landscape of Loss has blended my interests and experience in archaeology and war history,” Claire says.

A special family connection also helped spark Claire’s interest in how the war impacted the people back home and continues to shape her perspective.

“My great-great aunt’s 20-year-old fiancé went to war in 1917 and was killed in combat. She never went on to marry anyone else, and never forgot him. She passed down his war diary and photos to my grandmother who passed them on to me. He meant so much to her that she did everything she could to ensure his memory wouldn’t be forgotten. This story really drives me to question the way we remember, and to understand the real emotion that underpins this history,” she says.

As ANZAC Day approaches, Claire will attend a dawn service as she does each year but given the research that fills her days it’s also an educational outing.

“It’s a family tradition to go to the dawn service, but I also find it fascinating looking at it from a critical point of view. I’ll ask other people what motivates them to attend and often it’s because a relative fought in World War Two or Vietnam rather than the First World War.  It’s interesting to watch how remembrance is evolving, just as it’s interesting to examine the original history in greater detail.”